frgdr.com

After solving the Riddle of the Sphinx, there really aren’t that many riddles left to solve. The only one I can think of has to do with Israel Channel 10’s weather map and its representation of famous Israeli landmarks: Mount Hermon has a snowman, Haifa has the Baha’i Shrine, Tel-Aviv has the Azrieli skyscrapers and Jerusalem the Knesset.
Which leads us to the Beersheba conundrum: behind the inevitable camel, there is a complex of buildings which resembles nothing I have ever seen in the city, and certainly nothing that is as easily recognizable as the others mentioned.

Now, this may not be as important to solve as the Iranian nuclear race – but unlike Ahmadinejad, this one is within our reach:

Jerry I’m telling you I have this power. And I have no control over it.
 
   – - Cosmo Kramer – Seinfeld – s05e11

Just two days ago I blogged about the mixed messages sent by Agritech, Israel’s agricultural exhibition, in their full page ads which had both an inviting slogan (The world arrives in Israel! Israel awaits the world!) and a deterring world map featuring relocated countries and arrows pointing every which way.
Well, it only took one phone call to event organizer Atar Krauss (as suggested by a reader of mine) to produce some results. In today’s Maariv newspaper the new ad is partly fixed: the countries are still playing musical chairs (except for Korea, circled in yellow by me, which was moved back), but at least the arrows are pointing to Israel, helping the world arrive there:

Before:	After:
click image for higher resolution

“Ya know, I don’t get it. I’m not allowed to ask a Chinese person where a Chinese restaurant is? Aren’t we all getting a little too sensitive? If somebody asks me which way is Israel, I don’t fly off the handle.”
 
  - – Jerry Seinfeld – Seinfeld – s05e10

Israel may be a leader in agriculture, but probably not in cartography. Agritech, The 17th International Agricultural Exhibition will be held in Tel-Aviv this coming week. Published in the local papers is an ad for the event sporting a map of the world and the ambiguous slogan “The world arrives in Israel! Israel awaits the world!”. I assume publishing full page ads is costly, and so I have to wonder: who was in charge of putting arrows on the map to direct the world to Israel?

Come to think of it, upon closer inspection this seems like the craziest map I have ever seen:
Korea seem to have moved into China, Nigeria is now in the center of Africa instead of the Congo, Ukraine moved to Russia and Bulgaria is now where Germany used to be. Way to welcome the world to your exhibition, Agritech! …or is this game of musical chairs intended to break the ice?
Israel gets plenty mad whenever anyone gets creative drawing a map of the Middle East and usually raises a storm when someone uses a different color for the occupied territories – so the act of relocating whole countries seems to me like the strangest way to say welcome.

Update: This post has a follow-up here.

When I wanted to know how to get to a certain address in Jerusalem, these were the travel instructions I got from Israel’s leading mapping website emap.co.il:

…
7.  Straight on Agripas
8.  Turn left on Ki’akh
9.  Straight on Ha-Nevi’im
10. Take ramp to say what?
…

Yes, it is not a software bug; it is an induced-Hebrew-learning feature.